cover image Kafka Translated: How Translators Have Shaped Our Reading of Kafka

Kafka Translated: How Translators Have Shaped Our Reading of Kafka

Michelle Woods. Bloomsbury, $29.95 (304p) ISBN 978-1-4411-9771-9

Woods (Translating Milan Kundera) fuses history, semiotics, linguistics, and literature onto the extensive record of Kafka translations. Here, translation is not presented as a dry or romanticizing enterprise of sacred texts, but as lively writing which restores the connection between the humans who translate and the texts they produce. Woods is a wonderful narrator for this admittedly dense scholarship. The scholar's creativity is matched by her contagious love of language. She shows us how a translator's cultural background and gender appear in both the texts they create and the reception of these texts. The book transforms existing notions of errors into exhibits on ways of seeing, on both the part of the translator and the critic. While this study is specific to Kafka, its ramifications are much broader. Woods' familiarity with other canonical writers often read in translation%E2%80%94especially Kundera%E2%80%94shapes her perspective on Kafka's translations, his response to them, and why a translator makes different choices about his work. Anyone interested in the craft and politics of translation, or fascinated by the movement of ideas between languages and mediums, will find "pleasure and humor" here, two traits Woods argues have been neglected in our understanding of Kafka's work. (Nov.)